The use of cellular telephones and wireless networks has become increasingly widespread. As the use of cellular telephones has increased, the number and quality of additional features made available with the cellular telephones has also increased. For example, some mobile stations (e.g., cellular telephones) are able to provide quality-of-service (QoS) functionality under current wireless standards.
However, several unresolved issues associated with these standards include traffic category assignment, content-based policies, and hybrid networks. For traffic category assignment, the current standards do not define how the traffic categories are assigned. They may be assigned directly by the application or by another entity in the network, although an application update may be required. If the network is already QoS enabled, the proper traffic category may be assigned by mapping the upper layer QoS parameters. In general, an edge-oriented technique is more appropriate because it cannot take into account specific media related constraints.
For content-based policies, each packet may have a different level of importance with respect to the perceived quality within the same flow. In the case of MPEG2 video, for example, I frames are much more important than B frames and P frames in terms of perceived quality. Content-based differentiation may be important in high-multimedia content networks, such as home networks.
For hybrid networks, the deployment or upgrade of wireless networks requires a hardware substitution or a firmware update, depending on the manufacturer. During initial phases of deployment, the nodes that use different technologies may well be in the same network. Thus, this situation of having different technologies in the same network may exacerbate unfairness among the clients or terminals.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for improved wireless networks that resolve these issues. In particular, there is a need for a wireless network that is able to take into consideration all the layers in the application stack responsible for transmitting data in order to generate a QoS matrix based on QoS data in each of the layers such that a corresponding base station may implement cross-layer QoS functionality for prioritizing packets based on the QoS matrix.